Subject: Corn vs. Maize

From: [email-masked] (Ellen C.)
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 1994 03:32:10 GMT

I think I know that "corn" and "maize" are used interchangeably in the
Americas, but I was just informed by my SO these terms are used to
distinguish differing vegetables elsewhere in the world.  For example,
he claims that those little, tiny corn cobs used in Chinese cooking are
"corn" and that "maize" refers specifically, and only, to what the
Indians grew here.  (IE, "Indian corn" )

Our dictionary (Webster's unabridged) says that "corn" means "wheat" in
England and "oats" in Scotland and Ireland.  Just what IS corn ??

Can anyone help us better understand this ?

Thanks a lot!

-- 
Ellen C.
For e-mail, please use:  [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Dorothy J Heydt)
Date: 9 Feb 1994 22:18:21 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Ellen C. <[email-masked]> wrote:
>Americas....

Actually, we tend to use "corn" to mean "maize" and not to know what
"maize" means unless we read a lot.

>England and "oats" in Scotland and Ireland.  Just what IS corn ??

"Corn" is a very old word.  I forget exactly what the Proto-Indo-European
version is, but Germanic "korn" is cognate (=comes from the same
ancestor-word) as Latin "granum" from which we get "grain." 

The word means "whatever grain you grow the most of in your neighborhood"--
in England, that's wheat; in parts of Germany, it's a wheat variant
called spelt.  When English immigrants first started trying to farm in
New England, they found their wheat wouldn't grow, or grew very badly,
in the colder New England climate.  So they concentrated on growing
the local maize and called it "Indian corn" and later just "corn".

The usage "Indian {corn,summer,giver,...} to mean "not the real thing"
is only a recent development of a tendency in English and other
Germanic languages to use "{other ethnic group's} X" to mean "not
a real X".  Cf. "French leave" (not leave at all, but going AWOL);
"Dutch treat" (not a treat, since each pays his own way); and going
even further back, "walnut" meaning "foreign"--in this case, "Roman" nut.

Dorothy J. Heydt
(I used to be a linguistics major--but that was in another country,
and besides, the wench is dead.)
[email-masked]	
University of California
Berkeley

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From: [email-masked]
Date: 9 Feb 94 20:45:27 -0600

> Indians grew here.  (IE, "Indian corn" )

"Corn" to any but North Americans refers to the principal grain crop
of the region.  The stuff we (and the Australians) call corn is called
maize by the rest of the world.

Dr. Sam. Johnson defined "oats" as a grain fed to horses in England, but
to humans in Scotland... someone else remarked that that was probably
why England produced good horses, and Scotland produced good men...  ;-)
Wheat, Triticum aestivum, is the preferred grain in England, hence it
is the "corn" of England, while oats, Avena sativa, is a better adapted
(and higher protein!) grain for Scotland, and thus is the Scot's "corn".
I suspect that the word "corn" is probably closely allied to the German
"kern", grain, which is still in the English language as "kernal", a single
fruit of a grain crop.

BTW, the little cobs of sweetcorn that show up in some (adapted?)
Chinese dishes really are small cobs of sweetcorn, probably bred from
the Silver Queen cultivar.   If I recall my plant breeding course (many
moons ago!), Silver Queen was about the only cultivar grown in China
before WWII, and post-revolution maize breeding in China had only
Silver Queen and mutations of Silver Queen to work with.

> England and "oats" in Scotland and Ireland.  Just what IS corn ??

Kay Klier  Biology Dept  UNI

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From: [email-masked] (Nick Maclaren)
Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 14:24:05 GMT

>England and "oats" in Scotland and Ireland.  Just what IS corn ??

According to my Shorter Oxford, it comes from the Sanskrit grnom (meaning
to wear down) as does the word grain.  Both mean a small, worn down particle.
Its third meaning is a specialisation, and refers to the leading cereal
grain of the district.  Hence it could also be rye, millet or even sorghum.

Nick Maclaren
University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory,
New Museums Site, Pembroke Street,
Cambridge CB2 3QG, England.
Email:  [email-masked]
Tel.:   +44 223 334761
Fax:    +44 223 334679

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From: [email-masked] (Dorothy J Heydt)
Date: 13 Feb 1994 18:34:40 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Nick Maclaren <[email-masked]> wrote:
>to wear down) as does the word grain.....

OK, a small nitpick here.  Neither "corn" nor "grain" COME FROM the Sanskrit
word.  The Sanskrit word is _cognate_ to the Germanic and Latin and other
forms, meaning it is descended from the same common ancestor as they are.

An analogy:  My aunt and I look alike (modulo differences in age), and
we are related.  But she is not my ancestor; I am not descended from her.
We are descended from a common ancestor (her parents/my grandparents).

Now, Sanskrit is about the same "age" as Latin--that is, it was spoken
as a living language at about the same time.  Sanskrit changed, as all
languages change, over time, and after a while people were speaking a
different language (Prakrit, they called it) while Sanskrit was still
being used for religious purposes.  So that the worshippers (or at least
the priests!) would get the Sanskrit texts right, people started writing
grammars of Sanskrit.  On the whole, they did an excellent job, and present-
day linguistics draws on their traditions.

It happens that many nouns in Sanskrit are derived from verb roots by
various sound changes that I won't describe.  There are also many other
nouns that correspond to verb roots, even if they weren't derived from
them (noun and verb grew up together from infancy, so to speak).  The
Sanskrit grammarians, who prized elegance and brevity of statement,*
treated nouns as having been derived from verb roots *even when there
were no corresponding verb roots and somebody had to invent them*.  I
am not making this up.

In this case, I suspect that the verb root, which probably takes the
form _grn_ [and the r should have a little circle under it to show that
it is vocalic] is a real verb root, which grew up together with the
noun, which is probably something like garna- or grana-.  (Any real
Sanskritists around, who can correct me?  I'm working on memories from
the early sixties....)  "Grind" is what you do to grain; "grain" is one
of the things you grind.

We have very few words in English (except for grammatical terms, like
samdhi) that really descend from Sanskrit, and all of them I know about
come via Hindi.  E.g., "to commit suttee."  _sati_ (with a long -i)
is the nominative feminine singular of a word meaning "good".  The
"good wife" is the one who burns herself on her husband's funeral pyre.

>grain of the district.  Hence it could also be rye, millet or even sorghum.

What he said.  It means whatever you grow the most of: in England, wheat;
in Scotland, oats; in parts of Germany, spelt; in New England, maize
(though they soon found varieties of wheat that would grow in New England,
but then they had to call it "wheat", because "corn" already meant "maize.")

Dorothy J. Heydt

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From: [email-masked] (Dorothy J Heydt)
Date: 13 Feb 1994 18:37:24 GMT

Ooops!

In article <[email-masked]>,
I said, 

>....The

But I forgot to put in the footnote, which should have read,

*"The grammarian rejoices more over the saving of a syllable half the
length of a short vowel than over the birth of a son."

					Sanskrit proverb

Dorothy J. Heydt

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From: [email-masked] (Jack Campin)
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 1994 15:10:59 GMT

> England and "oats" in Scotland and Ireland.  Just what IS corn ??

This is what most older and less scholarly dictionaries say.  According to
the Aberdeen University Press Concise Scots Dictionary (pretty much state
of the art) this usage only dates from the 18th century.  And it seems to
be well and truly dead now (I wouldn't know about rural Scotland, never having
spent very long there, but nobody seems to call oats "corn" in the cities).
Maybe this way of using the word was a transient usage imported from English
by the elite or as part of the reorganization of agriculture around that
time?

The real authority here would be the Scottish Historical Thesaurus, which
is not going to be published this century at the present rate.

-- 
-- Jack Campin -- Room 1.36, Department of Computing & Electrical Engineering,
   Mountbatten Building, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh EH14 4AS
TEL: 031 449 5111 ext 4195         HOME: 031 556 5272        FAX: 031 451 3431
INTERNET: [email-masked]   BITNET: via UKACRL   BANG!net: via mcsun & uknet

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From: [email-masked] (John Mackin)
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 1994 09:23:03 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] writes:

> of the region.

Ah, no.  Sorry.  This would be true if "refers" were changed to "originally
referred"; as it stands it is just not correct.  Yes, this is absolutely
the former meaning of the word, but in today's English "corn" means
the fruit of /Zea mais/, unquestionably.

> The stuff we (and the Australians) call corn is called maize by
> the rest of the world.

As it happens, Australians use and understand "corn" and "maize"
interchangably.  When I came to this country in 1971 "maize" was
somewhat more common; since that time "corn" has come to dominate.

-- 
John Mackin <[email-masked]>
Knox's box is a 286.                 Fox in Socks does hacks and tricks
Knox's box is hard to fix.           To fix poor Knox's box for kicks.

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From: [email-masked] (Dorothy J Heydt)
Date: 15 Feb 1994 22:11:24 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>somewhat more common; since that time "corn" has come to dominate.

Makes perfect sense.  The original British usage has to share the
bandwitdth with a lot of (more recently) imported Yank terminology
spread by GIs, tourists, etc....

Dorothy J. Heydt

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From: [email-masked] (Stephen Bloch)
Date: 15 Feb 1994 19:22:12 -0500

Jack Campin <[email-masked]> wrote:
>According to the Aberdeen University Press Concise Scots Dictionary (pretty
>much state of the art) this usage ["corn" = most common local crop]
>only dates from the 18th century.  And it seems to

I've been to Scotland once in my life, for about two weeks in about 1990.
The first day I was there I heard a campground manager (in Ayrshire, in
case it matters) refer to a field of "corn" which was obviously not maize.

-- 
					Stephen Bloch
				     [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked]
Date: 16 Feb 94 10:42:48 -0600

> case it matters) refer to a field of "corn" which was obviously not maize.

Ditto... I spent a month in Great Britain a few years ago, mostly staying
at farmhouse b&b's... and we always seemed to wind up talking crops.  In
England, most of the farmers referred to wheat as corn, and in southern
Scotland it was oats=corn...  (didn't make it to northern Scotland that
trip.. :-(  )

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From: [email-masked] (Charlie Sorsby)
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 22:25:42 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (John Mackin) writes:
= In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] writes:
= 
= > "Corn" to any but North Americans refers to the principal grain crop
= > of the region.
= 
= Ah, no.  Sorry.  This would be true if "refers" were changed to "originally
= referred"; as it stands it is just not correct.  Yes, this is absolutely
= the former meaning of the word, but in today's English "corn" means
= the fruit of /Zea mais/, unquestionably.

And then, of course, we have "corn" as in corned beef (where it
refers to particles of salt) and skiiing (where it refers to
particles of snow).  :)

Welcome to rec.foods.linguistic...  :)

-- 
Best,

Charlie "Older than dirt" Sorsby				"I'm the NRA!"
	  [email-masked]